The prior art has attempted to deal with abnormal containers on a conveyor. Normal containers are unbroken containers standing upright on their bottoms. Abnormal containers include tipped containers lying on their sides and fragments of broken containers. Such prior art devices are shown for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,369,557; 3,097,732; 3,369,642 and 3,610,399. These devices typically are disposed on or adjacent to a rectilinear portion of the conveyor and function to reject abnormal containers laterally off the side edge of the conveyor. Sweep arms or curved guide rails are utilized to divert the abnormal containers from its rectilinear path and to reject the same. Such devices have not proved entirely satisfactory for rejecting large fragments of broken bottles, especially those broken off at their tops or at the neck, leaving the major portion of the bottle still standing upright. Such abnormal containers are not rejected by the prior art devices because the remaining bottle fragment is taller than the guide rail and is not released thereby. Moreover, the bottles usually are in mutual contact fore and aft and a bottle having its top broken off will be held or clamped upright by adjacent bottles and will not fall down to reduce its height to the level where it will be released by the guide rail.